One of the constraints of most home businesses is finding the money to market on a shoestring budget, or close to it. It’s significant that for small businesses that are busy enough, they feel they have little time to spare for marketing and too little money to be effective at it. This creates a cyclical revenue model that’s best avoided.
Cyclical Nature of Home-based Small Businesses
The common issue with small businesses is that they go through peaks and trough cycles. One month they have too many clients to deal with and the next too few. The reason for this is simple – when they’re too busy, they stop marketing because they know they cannot handle new business right now.
The mistaken assumption is that marketing today will lead to a new client tomorrow. Usually, that’s not the case. It may lead to a new customer in 3-4 weeks’ time, but it’s unlikely they’ll close a new deal the same day or the next day.
When the SME doesn’t market continually, their current crop of deals dries up and they have nothing lined up. Then when they do begin marketing again, it’ll be several weeks before they get back up to full speed again. This wait and hurry up process is highly disruptive to normal business operations, creates unnecessary stress and makes any financial projections instantly incorrect.
Little and Often is Better Than On/Off
As the author Mark Forster mentions in his book, Do It Tomorrow, doing things a little at a time and frequently which he dubbed “little and often” is a better process than doing them in unreliable fits and spurts. With his model, the task gets accomplished steadily over time – if not necessary quickly – rather than risking not completing it altogether. Forster’s way works well for many types of longer projects or work that is effectively done a little bit every business day and not all at once.
Count marketing and later following up with the same person as one useful example about doing a little marketing every day and not batching it up for one day a week. When allocating an hour or more every workday, it’s possible to contact the person and then on a later day, follow back up with them to see if they have any questions or a reason for hesitating to place an order.
Use the Most Affordable Marketing Methods
Use affordable marketing methods to get the brand in front of as many people as possible. If the venue or location has a quality audience that might match the business’s demographic, it’s worth going after.
One of the beautiful things about online advertising is that it’s so targeted. For instance, when advertising on Facebook, customers can be narrowed down by demographic, location, and close interest linkage with other customers through their useful ‘lookalike audience’ feature.
Make use of appropriate social media platforms but narrow it down to the most appropriate ones. To figure that out, look at your competition either locally or nationally. See what social platforms they’re on and how they’re performing.
Use the SimilarWeb web browser plugin to get an idea about where competitors’ social media traffic is coming from. They may post to several social media channels but perhaps competitors in your business category all seem to do well on one platform. Armed with this information, it’s possible to focus all social media efforts on that channel and avoid wasting time with the rest.
Keep the Message Simple
See if you can drill down to promoting a single product or service. Even if you have launched a handful to bolster your home-based business, push on just one of them until it gains major traction. Avoid dividing your efforts and not being successful with any of the products or services.
It’s better to get a foothold with one, ramp that up, and then diversify into several others than dividing up your efforts. In the first couple of years working from home, you really need people to associate the brand with one thing. When a person or business needs that thing done, they get in touch. This leads to a lot of repeat business, but loses its effectiveness if confusion sets in about what the business does.
Have an Impressive Web Presence
Web presence is an inexpensive way to market your services. As a home-based business, there’s no storefront to promote the brand, so the website must take the place of that.
If you are offering professional services like that of a designer, a photographer, an architect or another creative with a portfolio to display, then using a specialized portfolio platform is a better option than a general website with an awful portfolio feature that’s cumbersome for people to scroll through the latest photos.
The sites that can be created using a platform such as Format provide customers with a simple drag and drop interface to create a portfolio quickly and without fuss. Needing to know the technical details under the hood is unnecessary. Photos can be uploaded from a device, edited in Adobe Lightroom and updated dynamically or copied from your Instagram account too.
For design, there are both standard themes suitable for different industries and niches, and premium ones to get a unique look. When using the standard themes, they’re customizable to make tweaks or hire a web designer to make minor changes later.
Expand to Complementary Products When Ready
When the business can support it, consider what complementary products or services can be offered to customers beyond the main one. There are usually additional wanted items or services they’ve asked about that you’ve had to turn down before.
Look at what it will take to provide those services in-house while staying with the home office setup. Make sure you can maintain a high level of quality and professionalism with a new introduction to avoid losing brand reputation. A business reputation takes years to develop and hours to destroy; it’s always good to remember that.
Once ready, expand into related products or services that are a good fit with what customers are already receiving. Whilst moving into less related ones has the benefit of attracting a different market demographic, leave that for another time. Shoot for products or services that are add-ons to what people are already buying from the business.
Plan for Expansion Before It’s Needed
Plan for expansion. It’s not necessary to take on that first employee or outsource certain tasks to someone yet, but put the plans in motion. For instance, if certain smaller repetitive tasks will be pushed out to a virtual assistant to lighten the load, create video and audio commentary to teach how these will be performed. This way, when ready to move ahead with the outsourcing, the preparation has already been done.
Marketing on a small budget is all about making the most of what’s available. It’s not possible to be everywhere because there’s probably only you at the beginning and you’ll be stretched too thin. Just like with an argumentative person, it’s necessary to pick your battles. Similarly, look at cost, time required and effectiveness of different marketing opportunities to see which ones will pan out best for the business and those to skip until a later time.
